At 2023-01-23T00:32:53-0800, James Johnston wrote: > At one point it was like $22/page. > > On Sun, Jan 22, 2023 at 11:30 PM wrote: > > > Warner Losh wrote: > > > > > And I believe that the impetus for the V7 changes was > > > phototypesetting 'file not found' too often... But that last bit > > > is mostly because I want to believe. > > > > Doug McIlroy has told that story here, search the archives. > > It was indeed becase of the phototypesetter. Steve Johnson's email[0] (which I cited in my earlier reply to this thread) said it took only "a couple of days" after acquistion of the phototypesetter for this to happen. But the C/A/T was acquired by 1973[1], and the Hunt Brothers' cornering of the silver market occurred in March 1980[2], over a year _after_ the release of V7[3]. It seems both of these can't be true. I wondered if maybe only a later typesetter used a silver-based photochemical development process, but that doesn't work with troff history either, as device-independent troff wasn't ready to go until about January 1981, targetting the C/A/T and the Autologic APS-5[4], the latter with support so fresh that it wasn't in the manual yet[5]. Can someone reconcile these points? Regards, Branden [0] https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2013-December/006113.html [1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/man/man1/troff.1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday [3] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7 [4] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/Unix_4.0/Volume_1/00_Annotated_Table_of_Contents.pdf (p. 2) [5] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/Unix_4.0/Volume_1/C.1.2_NROFF_TROFF_Users_Manual.pdf (p. 34)